The Little Word that Turns the Cosmos

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

For the closing service at the Iowa Preachers Project, my partner in homiletical hijinks, Ken Jones, offered this sermon on the foolishness of preaching.

In the name of the Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

Paul begins this section of his letter by handing on two unexpected truths to the recalcitrant and fractious Corinthians.

First, you're wrong.

And second, you suck.

Thus, I'm only following one of my betters in two millennia of preachers when I say, here's a truth to declare to you all as you head home today.

Nobody wants what you're selling.

Not only does the world regard your line of work as being in the same category as purveyors of snake oil, it's not even sexy snake oil like mambas, cobras, and my South Dakota prairie rattlers. No, the world regards your stuff as harmless garter snake oil.

When I was growing up in the Black Hills of South Dakota on Sunday drives for picnics up in the mountains among the redolent ponderosa pines, our family would drive by all the tourist traps designed to lure in families of tourists with whiny kids in the way back of their paneled station wagons. Cosmos of the Black Hills, where you can see water flow uphill. Marine Life, where you can touch a seal in the middle of the continent where it should never be found. Rockerville, where you can pan for gold but wind up with worthless garnets. The place we Jones kids continually begged to go to was Reptile Gardens. They had a trained chicken show and they had alligator wrestling. But the star was the rattlesnake milking.

A staff member would grab a slithering serpent with a prod and then hold it behind its head, open its gaping maw, rest those sharp fangs over the edge of a petri dish and collect drops of rattlesnake venom. The spiel was that the venom would be used for healthful purposes. Even as a kid though, I had an inkling of Gen Z skepticism about what they were shilling. I knew rattlesnakes.

My family went rattlesnake hunting regularly in the summer. We'd drive the pickups to a rattlesnake den, park the trucks all around, the menfolk would get out their guns and start shooting those things, while the kids would be in the box of the pickup and then hop down and run to the other pickup and hop into that box, avoiding all those snakes. It was so much fun.

I do know that this whole thing in reptile gardens that act with milking rattlesnakes fangs. I do know that that kind of thing is where snake oil has its roots. A product made with some unusual ingredient that promises to fix what ails you, baldness, hemorrhoids, and women's problems, whether painful periods or unwanted pregnancies. Neil Diamond's brother -in -law's traveling salvation show reminded us that snake oil was often bound up with sketchy preachers and fawning beauties as feminine acolytes. So it's no surprise that anyone looks askance at you as wonders that can't be trusted. But it's actually worse than that. Not only are you irrelevant as snake oil sellers, someone to whom people in Pew Research polls say they're just not really into, when it comes down to it, for any human being with an ounce of self -respect, the word that the Holy Spirit has put on your lips is anathema.

It's not snake oil, but the poison itself. It is a threat to all that we children of Adam and Eve hold dear and that the world sees as most holy, autonomy, control, free will, and just desserts.

If we're surprised by the church's 21st century plummet, it's only because we have pretended that in our halcyon days of Fords with fender fins and pews filled with beheaded church ladies and their stoic husbands, our religious message was beloved. But that all may have been because the church reckoned itself as something other than what Paul declares in Romans.

As Paul deals with the wayward Corinthians, he knows the risen word who accosted him on the way to Damascus was contrary to the wisdom that sinners welcome with open arms.

He knows the gospel is utterly foolish. No one, no one wants a Lord who prefers losers and who seeks them out as customers. No one wants a Lord who has neither comeliness nor any proclivities toward prosperity.

When I was in high school, every time the thought of becoming a pastor entered my brain, I shoved it back in my mind's recesses and locked it in a chamber of dangerous secrets. The idea had to stay there because if I acted on it, I would become in a word. weird. And then what would Dennis' governor think of me? I already had a bully who accosted me in passing time each day with the word faggot to reduce me to the nothing that he thought I was. Did I want to add insult to injury? But I misunderstood the gift of this calling and the glory of operating on a holy island of misfit toys with all the other losers and lepers and layabouts who have no future, no joy, no life other than in Jesus. Little did I know years later I would understand the deep honor and deeper truth that becoming a gospel snake oil salesman would provide me.

When Jason and I were at the Conclave of Grantees in Indianapolis last March, I quickly realized that a goal for many of the programs that grantees were setting up was to help preachers attain greater relevance.

But that's a losing game for losers who haven't realized they're lost.

They think they can do something.

The gospel of Jesus Christ, you see, is never relevant to sinners.

It helps no one self-actualize. It doesn't look good on a spreadsheet, and it doesn't fix those voters in that other party.

The foolish snake oil we purvey presents instead a guy in the building trades who got executed.

It asserts that all of history suffered a tectonic shift at his last breath. It says the blood and Golgotha gore happened because human beings, including you and me, are too weak -willed to balance their karmic wheels. It proclaims the illogic of mere words, a splash of water, a chunk of bread, and a swallow of wine as having the capacity to hold the infinite presence, being, and will of God in wonder wonders, it declares that the way God chooses to bear out the divine will for the world and create the kingdom of heaven is to go all eschatologically delulu and appear through means such as you. What shall I do with you to send you home except to proclaim to you that you, misshapen, ridiculously self-involved and chronically slow on the uptake you are the exact ones whom God put in your church, your community, your specific world to open your gaping maw and let out a holy, braying YAWP as the sainted fools and asses you are. For the very thing that has saved you, grasped you and compelled you into this vocation, while totally irrelevant is the only thing, the very thing with the power to contend with the claims the world inflicts on those in your care. None of us has the will to enter into this fray. None of us has the wherewithal to affect the change we know the world needs.

You know that whole phrase, know, Gandhi, be the change in the world you want to see. You don't have it in you. And yet, and yet you have been made into people, finite beings with the capacity to hold the infinite mercy, steadfast love and will of God in the world.

Saving faith comes by hearing.

It must be spoken without reservation, without hedging of bets, and with equal measures of seriousness and giddy elation.

Your lips, teeth, and tongues have hearers waiting to receive what God has put me here today to hand on to you.

For the sake of Jesus Christ and by his authority, your quest for achievement as preachers has been usurped.

Your craven ethos to be the best is commandeered as an agent for his love. Your sinful breach from God is not just bridged, but cemented. Your jagged edge to his encompassing delight. He's begun a good work in you and is already making it complete.

You don't have to sell anything.

Just give it away.

The freedom and forgiveness and deliverance and life first given to you by Jesus who treads on snakes' heads and has all the snake oil bottled up in the spear wound in his side where his powerless claims can no longer have play.

My beloved fellow sinners, fools, and preachers, what an honor it is to know Jesus has created this space, this calling, this life for us, and to find myself in your company. We get to do this together. Yawp yawp for us. Delulu? Yup. Holy calling? Sure enough. Bet. Pitter patter, best get at her. Amen.